1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to keyboards, and particularly to arrangements of keys on keyboards that facilitate easy and rapid acquisition of typing skills. This invention relates especially, but not exclusively, to electrical keyboards for encoding electrical signals representing alphanumeric and other readable characters, and to electrical keyboard arrangements that can be easily learned by novice typists.
2. Background Art
Personal computers are now so widely used that many persons who formerly had no need to learn to type find they must for computer data inputting, word processing, communicating via electronic mail, and internet browsing. With the rapid proliferation of personal computers in the workplace, the home, and schools, the ability to quickly and intuitively learn the key layout is critical. This proliferation has created many new, non-traditional keyboard users and has created a class of persons, those unable to master the predominant, QWERTY layout, who are at a substantial disadvantage in the burgeoning computer revolution. The “Universal” or “QWERTY” keyboard arrangement (FIG. 1) was originally adopted for typewriters in the 1870s by inventor C. L. Sholes and his colleagues in an attempt to reduce the frequency of jamming of type bars during typing—if two typebars were near each other, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. To fix this, the most common letter pairs or digraphs in English usage, such as “TH” and “SH,” were assigned to keys that were separated such that their type bars had sufficient time to fall back far enough to be out of the way before the next one came up. In adopting the QWERTY arrangement, little or no attention was paid to arranging the keys in ways that would make it easy to learn the keyboard. The QWERTY arrangement does not organize the individual keys in an intuitive, easy-to-remember manner, creating great difficulty in the memorization of the keyboard format. As a result, many users resort to highly inefficient typing methods, such as “hunt and peck” and “two-finger typing,” that require the user to maintain eye contact with the keyboard to locate specific keys.
Another well known keyboard arrangement is the Dvorak system, which was designed to be easier to learn and use; see U.S. Pat. No. 2,040,248 to A. Dvorak; see also, R. C. Cassingham, The Dvorak Keyboard (Arcata, Calif.: Freelance Communications, 1986). The Dvorak style keyboard arrangement (FIG. 2) places the most common consonants on one side of the middle or home row and the vowels on the other side so that typing tends to alternate key strokes back and forth between the hands. Although in theory and by reputation, the Dvorak keyboard arrangement makes typing easier to learn (e.g., a typist can type about 400 of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row), recent scholarship indicates that these claims for it remain unproven, and they may even be a hoax. See S. Liebowitz and S. E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys,” J. Law & Econom. 16: 1-25 (April 1990).
Other approaches to these problems can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,053,647, 6,084,576, 5,498,088, and 2,040,248. Each on of these suffers, however, from one or more of the following disadvantages:
1. The keyboard arrangement does not provide an intuitive easy-to-remember key location format;
2. The keyboard arrangement is designed to enhance typing speed, not to provide an intuitive, easy-to-remember key location format;
3. The keyboard arrangement is designed to aid and assist the expert typist rather than the novice; and
4. The keyboard arrangement does not rely on learnable skills that can be readily acquired by young and elderly users.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a keyboard that overcomes the problems associated with the QWERTY and other prior art keyboard arrangements by assigning alphanumeric and other symbols to the keys in such a way as to provide an intuitive, easy-to-remember arrangement that facilitates efficient and effective keyboard use for all types of keyboard users. The present invention fulfills this need by grouping symbols according to the line elements comprising the symbols that all symbols within the group have in common, and by assigning symbols within the same group to logically grouped keys—for example, to keys within the same row or column. Japanese dictionaries commonly list characters according to the order and arrangement adopted by “Kohki-jitem” or “gyokuken,” such that characters are classified and grouped in the order of the number of strokes and the kinds of strokes or radicals that comprise the characters; see P. M. Suski, The Dictionary of Kan-Ji or Japanese Characters (S. Pasadena, Calif.: P. D. & Ione Perkins, 1942), at 206. But, the present invention's grouping of symbols and assigning of the symbols to keys in a keyboard arrangement based on the line elements that comprise the symbols, in order to facilitate learning to type, appears to be wholly novel. Even though letter forms vary so widely that one might argue, as has Douglas R. Hostadter in Metamagical Themas—Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1985) at 274, that “the essence of A-ness is not geometrical,” there is sufficient geometrical regularity in commonly used fonts and typefaces to usefully sort letters, numerals and special characters into “attribute classes” based upon their geometric forms.